An Excerpt from Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
An excerpt from Empire of AI by Karen Hao, published by Penguin Press and longlisted for the 2025 Porchlight Business Book Awards in the Current Events & Public Affairs category.
When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?
Over time, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question. Increasingly, she realized that the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that its vision of success requires an almost unprecedented amount of resources: the “compute” power of high-end chips and the processing capacity to create massive large language models, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans “cleaning up” that data for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the usage of energy and water underlying it all. The truth is that we have entered a new and ominous age of empire: only a small handful of globally scaled companies can even enter the field of play. At the head of the pack with its ChatGPT breakthrough, how would OpenAI resist such temptations?
Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Armed with Microsoft’s billions, OpenAI is setting a breakneck pace, chased by a small group of the most valuable companies in human history—toward what end, not even they can define. All this time, Hao has maintained her deep sourcing within the company and the industry, and so she was in intimate contact with the story that shocked the entire tech industry—Altman’s sudden firing and triumphant return. The behind-the-scenes story of what happened, told here in full for the first time, is revelatory of who the people controlling this technology really are. But this isn’t just the story of a single company, however fascinating it is. The g forces pressing down on the people of OpenAI are deforming the judgment of everyone else too—as such forces do. Naked power finds the ideology to cloak itself; no one thinks they’re the bad guy. But in the meantime, as Hao shows through intrepid reporting on the ground around the world, the enormous wheels of extraction grind on. By drawing on the viewpoints of Silicon Valley engineers, Kenyan data laborers, and Chilean water activists, Hao presents the fullest picture of AI and its impact we’ve seen to date, alongside a trenchant analysis of where things are headed. An astonishing eyewitness view from both up in the command capsule of the new economy and down where the real suffering happens, Empire of AI pierces the veil of the industry defining our era.
Empire of AI has been longlisted in the Current Events & Public Affairs category of Porchlight Book Company's 2025 Business Books Awards. The excerpt below comes from the book's Prologue.
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I began reporting on artificial intelligence long before OpenAI and ChatGPT became synonymous with the technology. I watched it evolve through the messy process of science and innovation as researchers trialed new ideas, presented their best successes at packed conferences, and brought them to bear on commercial products at the world’s biggest companies, including Google and Facebook, Alibaba and Baidu. I read hundreds of research papers and interviewed scientists, engineers, and executives to understand their worldviews and their decisions—and how those left fingerprints on the technology’s design and application. As AI’s footprint sprawled out globally, I tracked the subtle and dramatic ways it changed lives and communities. I traveled to five continents to hear from people about these experiences. In Colombia and Kenya, I met people who in the face of economic crisis turned to annotating data for the AI industry, only to find themselves working under conditions that resembled indentured servitude. In Arizona and Chile, I met with local politicians and activists worried about the growing shadow metropolis of data centers guzzling their homes’ precious water resources.
Through my reporting, I’ve come to understand two things: Artificial intelligence is a technology that takes many forms. It is in fact a multitude of technologies that shape-shift and evolve, not merely based on technical merit but with the ideological drives of the people who create them and the winds of hype and commercialization. While ChatGPT and other so-called large language models or generative AI applications have now taken the limelight, they are but one manifestation of AI, a manifestation that embodies a particular and remarkably narrow view about the way the world is and the way it should be. Nothing about this form of AI coming to the fore or even existing at all was inevitable; it was the culmination of thousands of subjective choices, made by the people who had the power to be in the decision-making room. In the same way, future generations of AI technologies are not predetermined. But the question of governance returns: Who will get to shape them?
The other thing I’ve learned: This current manifestation of AI, and the trajectory of its development, is headed in an alarming direction. On the surface, generative AI is thrilling: a creative aid for instantly brainstorming ideas and generating writing; a companion to chat with late into the night to ward off loneliness; a tool that could perhaps one day be so effective at boosting productivity that it will increase top-line economic activity. But in the same way we once thought Facebook was merely a place for posting vacation pictures and connecting with long-lost elementary school friends, or for sparking positive and transformative social movements, there is more to the sleek, entrancing exterior than meets the eye. Under the hood, generative AI models are monstrosities, built from consuming previously unfathomable amounts of data, labor, computing power, and natural resources. GPT-4, the successor to the first ChatGPT, is, by one measure, reportedly over fifteen thousand times larger than its first generation, GPT-1, released five years earlier. The exploding human and material costs are settling onto wide swaths of society, especially the most vulnerable, people I met around the world, whether workers and rural residents in the Global North or impoverished communities in the Global South, all suffering new degrees of precarity. Rarely have they seen any “trickle-down” gains of this so-called technological revolution; the benefits of generative AI mostly accrue upward.
Over the years, I’ve found only one metaphor that encapsulates the nature of what these AI power players are: empires. During the long era of European colonialism, empires seized and extracted resources that were not their own and exploited the labor of the people they subjugated to mine, cultivate, and refine those resources for the empires’ enrichment. They projected racist, dehumanizing ideas of their own superiority and modernity to justif—and even entice the conquered into accepting—the invasion of sovereignty, the theft, and the subjugation. They justified their quest for power by the need to compete with other empires: In an arms race, all bets are off. All this ultimately served to entrench each empire’s power and to drive its expansion and progress. In the simplest terms, empires amassed extraordinary riches across space and time, through imposing a colonial world order, at great expense to everyone else.
The empires of AI are not engaged in the same overt violence and brutality that marked this history. But they, too, seize and extract precious resources to feed their vision of artificial intelligence: the work of artists and writers; the data of countless individuals posting about their experiences and observations online; the land, energy, and water required to house and run massive data centers and supercomputers. So too do the new empires exploit the labor of people globally to clean, tabulate, and prepare that data for spinning into lucrative AI technologies. They project tantalizing ideas of modernity and posture aggressively about the need to defeat other empires to provide cover for, and to fuel, invasions of privacy, theft, and the cataclysmic automation of large swaths of meaningful economic opportunities.
OpenAI is now leading our acceleration toward this modern-day colonial world order. In the pursuit of an amorphous vision of progress, its aggressive push on the limits of scale have set the rules for a new era of AI development. Now every tech giant is racing to out-scale one another, spending sums so astronomical that even they have scrambled to redistribute and consolidate their resources. Around the time Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI, it laid off ten thousand workers to cut costs. After Google watched OpenAI outpace it, it centralized its AI labs into Google DeepMind. As Baidu raced to develop its ChatGPT equivalent, employees working to advance AI technologies for drug discovery had to suspend their research and cede their computer chips to develop the chatbot instead. The current AI paradigm is also choking off alternative paths to AI development. The number of independent researchers not affiliated with or receiving funding from the tech industry has rapidly dwindled, diminishing the diversity of ideas in the field not tied to short-term commercial benefit. Companies themselves, which once invested in sprawling exploratory research, can no longer afford to do so under the weight of the generative AI development bill. Younger generations of scientists are falling in line with the new status quo to make themselves more employable. What was once unprecedented has become the norm.
Today, the empires have never been richer. As I finished writing this book in January 2025, OpenAI topped a $157 billion valuation. Anthropic, a competitor, was nearing a deal that would value it at $60 billion. After striking its partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft tripled its market capitalization to over $3 trillion. Since ChatGPT, the six largest tech giants together have seen their market caps increase $8 trillion. At the same time, more and more doubts have risen about the true economic value of generative AI. In June 2024, a Goldman Sachs report noted spending on the technology’s development was projected to hit $1 trillion in a few years with so far “little to show for it.” The following month, a survey from The Upwork Research Institute of 2,500 workers globally found that while 96 percent of C-suite leaders expected generative AI to boost productivity, 77 percent of the employees actually using the tools reported them instead adding to their workload; this was in part due to the amount of time spent reviewing AI-generated content, in part due to growing demands from superiors to do more work. In a November Bloomberg article reviewing the financial tally of generative AI impacts, staff writers Parmy Olson and Carolyn Silverman summarized it succinctly—the data “raises an uncomfortable prospect: that this supposedly revolutionary technology might never deliver on its promise of broad economic transformation, but instead just concentrate more wealth at the top.”
Meanwhile, the rest of the world is beginning to collapse under the weight of the exploding human and material costs of this new era. Workers in Kenya earned starvation wages to filter out violence and hate speech from OpenAI’s technologies, including ChatGPT. Artists are being replaced by the very AI models that were built from their work without their consent or compensation. The journalism industry is atrophying as generative AI technologies spawn heightened volumes of misinformation. Before our eyes, we’re seeing an ancient story repeat itself—and this is only the beginning.
OpenAI is not slowing down. It is continuing to chase even greater scales with unparalleled resources, and the rest of the industry is following. To quell the rising concerns about generative AI’s present-day performance, Altman has trumpeted the future benefits of AGI ever louder. In a September 2024 blog post, he declared that the “Intelligence Age,” characterized by “massive prosperity,” would soon be upon us, with superintelligence perhaps arriving as soon as in “a few thousand days.” “I believe the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now,” he wrote. “Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs—fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics—will eventually become commonplace.” At this point, AGI is largely rhetorical—a fantastical, allpurpose excuse for OpenAI to continue pushing for ever more wealth and power. Few others have the comparable capital to invest in alternative options. OpenAI and its small handful of competitors will have an oligopoly on the technology they’re selling us as the key to the future; anyone— whether company or government—who wants a piece of that vision will have to rely on the empires to provide it.
There is a different way forward. Artificial intelligence doesn’t have to be what it is today. We don’t need to accept the logic of unprecedented scale and consumption to achieve advancement and progress. So much of what our society actually needs— better health care and education, clean air and clean water, a faster transition away from fossil fuels—can be assisted and advanced with, and sometimes even necessitates, significantly smaller AI models and a diversity of other approaches. AI alone won’t be enough, either: We’ll also need more social cohesion and global cooperation, some of the very things being challenged by the existing vision of AI development.
But the empires of AI won’t give up their power easily. The rest of us will need to wrest back control of this technology’s future. And we’re at a pivotal moment when that’s still possible. Just as empires of old eventually fell to more inclusive forms of governance, we, too, can shape the future of AI together. Policymakers can implement strong data privacy and transparency rules and update intellectual property protections to return people’s agency over their data and work. Human rights organizations can advance international labor norms and laws to give data labelers guaranteed wage minimums and humane working conditions as well as to shore up labor rights and guarantee access to dignified economic opportunities across all sectors and industries. Funding agencies can foster renewed diversity in AI research to develop fundamentally new manifestations of what this technology could be. Finally, we can all resist the narratives that OpenAI and the AI industry have told us to hide the mounting social and environmental costs of this technology behind an elusive vision of progress.
From Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI by Karen Hao, published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Karen Hao.
About the Author
Karen Hao is an award-winning journalist covering the impacts of artificial intelligence on society. She writes for publications including The Atlantic and leads the Pulitzer Center's AI Spotlight Series, a program training thousands of journalists around the world on how to cover AI. She was formerly a reporter for the Wall Street Journal covering American and Chinese tech companies and a senior editor for AI at MIT Technology Review. Her work is regularly taught in universities and cited by governments. She has received numerous accolades for her coverage, including an American Humanist Media Award and American Society of Magazine Editors NEXT Award for Journalists Under 30. She received her bachelor of science in mechanical engineering from MIT.
